Free The Lunatic Express by Carl Hoffman

eventually stopped completely.
    I hailed an auto rickshaw for the train station. Mombasa was sticky, humid, and chaotic, but I liked it. Arabs had been crossing the Indian Ocean to the East African coast for centuries, joined by Indians in the nineteenth century, and the streets were packed with women in loose, flowing, burkha-like robes called buibui , with ornately hennaed feet, and Indians in gold and blue saris, and men in skullcaps. But when the rickshaw dropped me off at the train station, something felt wrong. The old, one-story brick building lay behind a wall and a fence in a beaten dirt and gravel yard, and it was deserted. SAY NO! TO BRIBERY AND CORRUPTION! announced a battered blue metal sign. PLEASE DO NOT GIVE OR RECEIVE BRIBES. DO NOT NEGOTIATE FOR UNDUE FAVORS!
    A guard stood at the gate. “Oh, many troubles,” he said, sweating under a white shirt and tie over a second collared shirt, with pink and blue stripes. “The train is canceled now because we care too much about our customers.” That was a bit too enigmatic for me, so I pressed on, and found a woman behind steel bars at the ticket office. “They have suspended service because of the kills,” she said. “For the time being there is too much risk to human beings.” The recent elections in Kenya had unleashed a wave of ethnic cleansing around Nairobi and the Rift Valley, which had mostly calmed. Now the trouble lay with the Mungiki, a mafia-like organization linked to Kenya’s most numerous tribe, the Kikuyu. They were referred to as a sect and shrouded in myth: Mungiki sniffed tobacco standing in rivers wearing loincloths. They bathed in blood mixed with urine and goat tripe. They stripped women of short skirts in public, and forcibly circumcised them. In fact, the Mungiki received most of their income from Nairobi’s matatu industry, the private minibuses notorious for overcrowding and murderous traffic accidents, and claimed two million members, including high-ranking members of the government and the police. Their leader had recently been jailed and then his wife murdered; the current riots were blamed on the police’s refusal to let him attend her funeral. “The train was attacked last week by those Mungiki people and the tracks removed and the train capsized,” the woman in the ticket office said. “It is terrible; the coaches just climb all over each other.”
    “So there are no trains going?” I asked.
    “The cargo is going, we can pick that up and we are working on the tracks. But we care a great deal about our passengers. Traveling by air, my good sir,” she said, “is much safer these days. We will review the situation on Monday.”
    It seemed worth waiting to find out, so I settled into the Castle Royal Hotel. A long veranda ran the width of the hotel, buffered from the street by planters with mother-in-law-tongue and hibiscus. Ceiling fans stirred the thick humidity; little groups of Indian businessmen huddled together drinking glasses of fluorescent orange passionfruit juice. When the waiter came over I ordered a Tusker beer. “White Cap!” a man sang out at the table next to me. “White Cap is the only good beer in Kenya. It’s like a German beer!”
    Joaquin Fechner was chubby and pale and wearing a khaki fishing vest over a pink shirt. He was sweating profusely, a Swiss native who’d been living in Africa for twenty-five years, and in Mombasa the past six. “Come join me,” he said.
    Fechner was having a few beers before jumping on a night bus to Nairobi, and he wasn’t too enthusiastic about the train. “It’s very dangerous,” he said. “I would not travel on that train right now. The Mungiki are uneducated. Fanatical. Obsessed. You know what they do?” He leaned forward. A drop of sweat slid off his chin and splashed on the table. “The Mungiki will cut your penis off. With a machete!” The bus, he thought, would be okay. “The buses wait outside Nairobi and then travel into the city in a